ReliabilityX

Tag: Continuous Improvement

  • Self-Discipline Part 3

    Self-Discipline Part 3

    We’ve spoken enough about the psychology of self-discipline, let’s get into actionable steps, things that are easy to remember and implement on a day to day basis. If writing some of these down on a post-it note help remind you, do it.

    Let’s talk about developing determination – we have six steps that can help improve how determined you are, and how to avoid losing willpower.

    • Give everything 100%. This doesn’t mean that you’re going to change your diet from garbage to perfectly clean overnight, but you won’t give 25% effort and expect 100% results.
    • Avoid distractions that derail from your end goal. There’s countless examples, but the most common one I’ve seen are meetings at work. It’s a cliche because it’s almost always true – turning half your meetings into emails can double the amount of time you actually get things done.
    • Commit to the end goal at the beginning. You might be delayed, frustrated or hit road blocks, but you won’t let that stop you from reaching the end goal you planned on.
    • Fight negative thoughts. Negativity is a hole in your boat. The longer they’re there, the more you sink, even if you keep taking action. Reframe any negative thoughts to find specific actionable steps you can take to reduce the harm. Realize that everyone who thinks “I can’t do this” will prove themselves right.
    • Road blocks are to be expected. Nothing in life worth having ever comes without mountains to climb. When you know the road will be tough, not hoping it’s easy, you’re able to take the bumps in stride.
    • Act NOW. Hesitation is the hole that procrastination and doubt fit through. Waiting for the perfect time will allow negative thoughts to creep in, and make you question your entire plan. More is lost through indecision than wrong decision.

    Those six steps are the fastest and simplest way to increase how determined you are to get to your goals. We’re going to end the chapter with a little different advice, what not to do.

    If you’re ever looking to increase self-control, the simplest and most effective advice is to take ten seconds.

    Literally, take a deep breath, count for ten seconds, and then re-engage whatever problem you’re facing.

     

    If you have a hot temper, or have had a bad day and want to take it out on someone, you know that it is not going to make your situation any better, but you think it will make you feel better.

    The truth is, you’re taking your bad day and passing it to them without getting rid of it yourself. You are still in a terrible mood, and now you’ve spread that to someone else. Later you’ll feel guilty on top of whatever caused the problem and now you’ve made someone totally unwilling to help with whatever problem caused all of this in the first place!

    So just remember to take a breath and count to ten.

    Next we’ll cover where this self-discipline will be implemented, and it’s above and beyond just yourself

  • Self-Leadership-Part 3

    Self-Leadership-Part 3

    We now know how to audit our time, to assess our self-leadership, but we can help even further explain how to become more effective and efficient leaders of ourselves.

    The first thing we need to do is be empowered to make our own strategy. This comes with a few requirements.

    First is the confidence to know that the rules are changing, which means the limits that we had on our previous strategies: real or fake, internal or external, all of them have to be re-assessed with fresh eyes. Like everything in life, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is permission, so removing limits that you think might be imagined can always be quickly corrected and brought back into the calculation if you’re proven wrong. If you’re right though, and it wasn’t a real limit, you just greatly expanded the possibilities moving forward!

    Next is the courage to know in your heart that you will likely have failures along the way. For every successful business, more than a dozen attempts will fail. For every single three-pointer that Michael Jordan made, he also missed one…and he’s Michael Jordan! Failure is not only possible, it’s likely. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work to minimize the cost of failure, or avoid obvious roadblocks, but you should accept that if you drive down enough highway, there’s going to be a few pot holes.

    An odd part of life is that if you’ve never experienced failure, then you’re not taking big enough risks. If you spend life focused on never being lower than first place, you’re never going to be fighting above your weight class, always focused on being the big fish in the little pond – which for most people ambitious enough to read a book like this is a tragedy in itself!

    It’s not always just “go bigger” in life. Personally, one of the things I’ve focused on improving in life is the soft skills side of business. I’ve never had trouble with hard work, or learning difficult concepts, but I knew that a part of what was holding my career back was my soft-skills needed to be improved.

    The fear of failure I was facing wasn’t about talking to CEO’s about what the problems were, or not understanding difficult situations, but failing to see how the little things, like being personable and sociable, can make it easier to achieve bigger and better goals.

    When you’re not only the guy who knows the most about a topic in the room, but the guy every likes and wants to see succeed just based off your personality, the fact that you know more means you’re going to get 100 times more accomplished than someone who snubs the receptionist and is sarcastic in meetings.

    This is one of the areas where mentorship can really accelerate your success. In a work environment, after a few years, you can very slowly get into bad habits. Sometimes so slowly that you don’t notice them.

    Imagine one day you ran late and skipped brushing your teeth. Then you stopped brushing your teeth every day, instead just every other day. Then after a month, every third day, and soon it’s once a week. Now you start talking to a stranger for the first time and they shout “OOH-WEE! Your breath stinks!”

    This is the advantage that mentorship can bring into life. Because they’re not constantly seeing you every day, but maybe once a month, maybe once a year, they’re going to be able to look at you and tell you, if you want to get to the North Pole, what the heck are you doing going southwest?!

    Mentors are the equivalent of having a port you can put your sailboat in, and they can tell you that your maps are all outdated, and your compass is crooked. The best part is they can save you years of work, without you even knowing you’re investing in all of the wrong areas.

    Even if you haven’t found a mentor, there’s likely other people in your life who can serve the same purpose. It might be a spouse, a friend from your past, previous colleagues, anyone who has the chance to see you over a long term period of time, and can have an external view.

    Another part of self-leadership is knowing that somethings just have limits, even if they’re critical for your success. You need to focus on keeping a steady ship moving, not just moving as fast as possible.

    To do this, you need to find out what the limits are by talking to the people in your life who you affect.

    For example, if you’re trying to grow your new business, and are putting every single dollar you make into it – which is very common for entrepreneurs to do for years, sometimes – there’s other people who need to be consulted.

    Just because you’re comfortable living on ramen and beans for the three years you think it will take to get your business where it needs to be, doesn’t mean that your spouse is comfortable there.

    This is where you need to find out what the limits to how hard and how fast you can push certain variables. You might want to be the next Elon Musk, but if spending time with your children while they’re young is something you value, you need to make that a conscious choice.

    Remembering back to the time audit we did earlier, if your goals include spending time with your kids, it’s not time wasted as long as it doesn’t derail your other responsibilities.

    That being said, you can’t use the fact that you love your children as an excuse to prevent you from going after your dreams. You have to make the tough call that sometime you might need to sacrifice one for the other, but make it consciously.

    With everything in life, it takes a balance, but finding out what that balance will look like is one of the core components of self-leadership. Having a conversation with yourself and the people you affect about really what the goals you have will be the guiding light that lights the way for self-leadership.

    The good news is that since you’ve bought this book and read this far, you’ve already started taking real action towards that goal.

     

  • Self-Leadership-Part 2

    Self-Leadership-Part 2

    Self-leadership is the constant step of focusing on forward motion, and taking out your compass to make sure you’re always still heading north. Constant action in the wrong direction can be just as harmful as standing still, sometimes worse.

    This is a constant three step process. As your journey keeps moving forward, you need to keep checking your sails to make sure the wind is moving you in any direction: this is self-leadership.

    Next, you need to make sure you’re constantly checking the compass for due north: this is self-awareness. Finally, having the courage to look at your compass and know that north actually means north, and not “let the wind take me where it wants” is self-accountability.

    The good thing is that as long as you’re constantly checking the compass for true north, don’t lie to yourself about what true north is, and that there’s always wind in the sails – you don’t need to worry much more about getting to your goals, it’s just going to be a bit more time until you’re having hot chocolate with Santa.

    The trouble that most people run into with this is realizing that you need to keep running through the cycle. It’s not a recipe to cook, and then you’ve “succeeded”; it’s a constant turning of a crank through those three steps mentioned above.

    It’s easy to become complacent after the first few miles of the journey, and believe that the journey is “on a good trajectory”. The reality is that currents and wind can change direction in an instant, much faster in real life than in a sailboat.

    Industries can be destroyed in a blink of an eye, ask any travel agent what happened when the internet came along. Your personal goals can change as quickly as a car accident or a family member gets sick. This is why it’s a constant cycle, in good times and bad, to keep rotating through these three steps.

    One of the important reasons that self-leadership is so important is because of passion. Passion is great when it’s getting you to jump out of bed, ready to conquer the day, but that’s not always there, and relying on that is setting yourself up to fail.

    “The difference between a professional and an amateur is that while the amatuer relies on passion for progress, the professional relies on habits and self-discipline to fill in for the days passion doesn’t show up.” – Greg Gylling, Author

    The reality of life is that everyone on Earth has 24 hours in their day, 7 days in their week and 365 days in the year. The difference between people who have achieved everything they want, and people who sit and suffer silently is the ability to really look at how their time is used.

    The best way to show your true motivations is to look at the difference between where your plan was, and where you actually focused your efforts.

    If you’re serious about getting your finances under control, take a month and look at what your budget was against the receipts of everything you bought. Sure you “really wanted to save money” but when you’re forced to look at each lunch eaten out, or money spent at the bar, or any other thing you promised you’d avoid, you’re getting what your true motivations are.

    It turns out that getting out of debt just really wasn’t as important as a taco lunch with two beers and appetizers.

    This same strategy is even more powerful when you focus it on the only finite resource you have: your time.

    A funny part of life is that people who would drive 15 minutes to save a penny a gallon on gasoline rarely treat their time as valuable as a few dollars. You can always make more money, but you can’t make more time.

    A great exercise to show your real preferences is as follows.

    Attorneys are known for billing every single minute possible to their clients, so they have to keep meticulous records. Attorneys can tell you what they were doing from 3:30-3:40 on January 17th, 10 years ago; and if you want to focus your time as effective as they do, then copy what they do!

    Take two pieces of paper, and along the left hand side, divide it into 12 sections vertically, and label them one through twelve. These are going to represent the time from midnight to noon on the first page, and then noon to midnight on the second page. Then make 3 rows of 2 lines within each of the twelve rows. Each of these lines is going to represent a 10 minute segment, meaning you’ll have 3:00-3:10 on one line, 3:10-3:20 on the next and so on, until your full day is accounted for in ten minute increments.

    First comes the simple part!

    You’re going to record everything you do in a single day, in ten minute increments. It will take 5 seconds per section, and if you work for 3 hours on something you don’t need to fill in multiple lines, just draw an arrow until you’re done and moved onto another task.

    Now comes the painful part!

    What we have are the “receipts” for how you actually spend your time. Sure you budgeted for 30 minutes in the gym, but it turns out 30 minutes was actually spent “settling in the office” in the beginning of your day. Between getting a cup of coffee, catching up with co-workers about last night’s big game, refilling the coffee and finally sitting down at your desk, it’s been almost 45 minutes before you actually start the work you’re hired to do!

    Add in 15 minutes talking about where to get lunch with co-workers, 10 minutes on how the boss is a jerk and the quota’s we have are totally unachievable, 45 minutes at lunch, and then 15 more minutes to “settle back in” to work, plus 20 minutes of “checking facebook”, you’ve burned close to an hour and a half on something that gets you nowhere.

    The point of this exercise isn’t to make it so you’re going crazy over not wasting a single minute of your time, or not being polite to colleagues, but to make you conscious of the time that you are wasting now without thinking.

    When you do this for a whole week, which is enough for most people to consciously observe their behavior, you’ll see how quickly things like Facebook become (unpaid and totally unproductive) part-time jobs, with minutes adding into hours faster than you’d think. How many of these jobs have you signed yourself up for without ever thinking about it?

    Over the course of six months, even ten minutes in the morning, ten at lunch and ten at night turn into almost 3 work-weeks! Imagine what you could do if you didn’t let yourself get off course like that and found 3 free weeks of work you could bring back to your life, how much faster would you achieve your goals?

    • Would you have been able to get a realtor’s license and have a new source of income?
    • Would you have been able to complete a professional certification and brought your career to the next level?
    • Would your relationship with your kids be better if you could spend 3 extra weeks with them?

    Even just taking the time to write down a few days can be enough for your subconscious to kick in, whenever you open up Facebook, or start up the Xbox, or think about heading to the bar for what you know is another night of wasted time, money and likely brain cells.

    You know that no one but yourself is going to know, maybe you’re not really wasting your time, but when you shut the TV off, that’s when you’re exercising the self-leadership it takes to get what you want out of life.